Underground Traffic
The Tunnel Business is booming so following some facts:
- Rafah straddles the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. It is divided by an 18ft metal wall that stretches more than 2km (1.2 miles)
- An estimated 40,000 people live on the Egyptian side of Rafah, and 150,000 on the Gaza side
- Tunnels have been used to smuggle goods, weapons and people across the border at Rafah since the early 1990s
- As deep as 20 metres, most have ventilation shafts every 200 metres or so, and engineers can dig an estimated 15 metres a day, using a compass to set the direction
- They are dug from the basements of homes along a 9km stretch of the border
- Having a person smuggled across costs about £1,000, A sack of items about £150
- Since January 2003, the tunnels have been used to smuggle large amounts of various types of weapons into the Gaza Strip, including dozens of RPG rockets and launchers, hundreds of kilograms of explosives, hundreds of rifles (mainly Kalashnikov AK47s) and tens of thousands of bullets, cartridges and other types of ammunition
